Website: www.londonvp.com
Contact email: innovate@londonvp.com
About London Venture Partners LLP
LVP is a venture capital seed fund with a difference – we are experts in the games sector, and we only ever invest in the games ecosystem. That means we bring real experience and a deep understanding. We speak the same language, share the same references, comprehend the same challenges – and we believe in the same future.
We know instinctively where the opportunities lie; where there are strengths to be harnessed and risks to be mitigated. In candid and concise detail. We know when to bide time, when to iterate, when to pivot and when to open up. And how.
First and foremost, we invest in highly talented individuals. That means founders with the potential to build the best in class; teams with exceptional creativity or innovative ideas for revolutionary games technology and services…coalescing around a unique vision that sets them apart.
We’ve done our 2-guys-in-a-garage start-up. We’ve helped companies transition from back-of-an-envelope concepts to multi-billion-dollar champions. It isn’t an insoluble problem for us; our passion is helping start ups to flourish strategically and operationally.
We’ll have thoughts that we want to share, pitfalls we’ll gladly warn of, and solutions to challenges we’ve overcome through hard experience. Success is never easy, but we’ve been privileged to be among the earliest investors in Supercell, Unity, Playfish, NaturalMotion, and a host of other leading immersive entertainment companies that have created over $13 billion in value.
Our interest in immersive technologies
The founders of LVP share a collective passion for all things gaming, nutured over the past 30 years through senior executive positions at Atari, Electronic Arts and Gumi. With our exclusive focus on the games ecosystem, we have been at the forefront of investing in innovative immersive technologies for over a decade and have enjoyed immense success helping the very best in creative talent to launch and transform their businesses. Network, processing, screen and graphics technologies have all developed dramatically during this time, with such advances opening up exciting possibilities for games developers to imagine and conceive endlessly enthralling, interactive experiences.
Each year we seed in region of 8 new enterprises operating across the games sector, from the creation of original content and production tools through to the provision of support software services and distribution platforms. Additionally, we make follow-on investments into circa 80% of our existing portfolio holdings to further their development and accelerate expansion.
Examples of existing portfolio investments that we have made in the field of immersive technology include Polystream (cloud-streaming of 3D software without GPUs), Hadean Supercomputering (developing a proprietary cloud-OS to enable massive simulated worlds) and Sensible Object (voice-augmented table top gaming).
The value we can add to your company beyond capital
The LVP team possess diverse experience in helping new ventures to successfully launch and mature to become pioneering global enterprises. Through our extensive network of industry relationships and deep understanding of the interactive entertainment sector, we are able to confidently guide fledgling companies to overcome hurdles (prototyping, resourcing, logistics, distribution, market visibility, regulation and taxation, IP protection) whilst simultaneously fully exploiting opportunities (overseas expansion, product diversification, partnering and monetisation) as they rapidly scale.
We work very closely with each of our portfolio companies to ensure that the warm introductions we make to our key strategic partners are effective and deliver significant value, be this in helping to solve difficult technical issues, gaining footholds in core markets or even simply providing practical advice on how to best approach product development. Furthermore, the broad skills and knowledge of the LVP team mean that we can quickly digest complex problems or identify optimal solutions to ensure our investments maintain momentum and maximise the resources they have to hand, especially important in a fast evolving field such as immersive technology.
All of our past and future investments centre on creating and leveraging innovative intellectual property to deliver, enhance and customise the elite that software entertainment has to offer. As such, we are hugely proficient – technically, commercially and financially – with the development and application of immersive technologies and collectively the LVP team is able to draw on a wealth of experience that dates back to the inception of the video games industry.
We view the combination of capital and time we invest as rocket fuel to propel those businesses we believe offer the very best chance of becoming the next billion dollar companies. Our investors genuinely expect us to identify such enterprises as we have done it before, and more than once.
Collaborating with Innovate UK enables us to quicken the speed to market of our selected investments, alongside providing added breathing space so that teams can be truly innovative and ground-breaking in the immersive field.